P5 – Andrew Zawacki
£10.00
Endscape by Andrew Zawacki
“There is no landscape that is not obscure underneath its pleasing transparencies, if you speak to it endlessly,” wrote Édouard Glissant. Andrew Zawacki grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the geography—mountains, woodlands, reservoirs, fields, but also shuttered steel mills and hydro-electric dams—exerted a heavy influence on his developing sense of language, art, and history.
Now, even after two decades living in the American South, he still feels like he’s trespassing and eavesdropping, never at home. The photographs in Endscape try to revive the clandestine obscurity of these unfamiliar landscapes, listening hard for grace notes as we confront the drawing down of the earth as we know it. The deceptive beauty of this place is seductive and abject at once—and natural beauty is little other than history failing to unfold. If that past is rarely evident, it can be heard, faintly, filthily. There are haints at large at the forest edge, who bear with them a violence and a voice. In the aftermath, these images frisk for a human trace on the earthbound Georgia air.
Zawacki’s interlaced poems also track an itinerary over the Dixie countryside. While oblique in its own fashion, however, the writing speaks more explicitly of its author’s experience as a citizen laboring under the convening pressures of climate collapse, forever war, acute political distress, and the directives of global capital run amok. Part of a longer, ongoing project, this lyric series is meant to suggest an ‘afterpastoral,’ in which our once coherent exchange with the world has glitched into virtual spectacle and antagonisms accruing from technology, uneven market forces, and the fracturing of social life.
P5
P5 is a new photography and poetry pamphlet series directed by Photoworks in partnership with David Solo, and designed by Jane & Jeremy. Photography and poetry have been in dialogue since the earliest days of the camera. The space between these forms invites layered meaning, unexpected emotion, and new ways of seeing. Yet despite nearly 200 years of such work and many stand out examples, photo-poetry has not been widely recognised as a distinct genre.
Today there is a growing interest in this field, and to further encourage, support and draw attention to the possibilities of such combinations, we decided to launch a new pamphlet series called P5.
